I recently had a chance to present a shortened version of my positive leadership keynote speech.
While it was shorter, I was able to share some key points, with an audience that was right on target for the message. I was speaking to a group of leaders, who are part of a larger non-profit organization, but each person is part of a board of smaller organizations. As such, there were a number of different leadership roles represented.

Working Leaders

One of the key points I made to those attending was that I recognized that their positions were somewhat unusual from the point of standard leaders. What made them different is that they are working leaders. Each one of them was expected to also take part in non-leadership roles, at an equal peer-level with the rest of the non-leaders in the organization.
This is different than most corporate leaders, where as a rule of thumb, leaders are expected to take a more hands-off approach to the day-to-day work, at least when work is running normally. Of course, every leader should be prepared to help out with day-to-day work when there are unusual circumstances going on in the positions.

Leading Up

A key point for these leaders was to point out that they should expect more success by taking part in a positive, forward looking approach to their leadership. When challenges happen, you are usually better off describing how you want things to improve that spending wasted time and energy on what things were done wrong. You can recognize problems and missteps, but you are likely to have a better team and get better work done if you make sure to keep a solution-based approach than a blame-based approach.

Important Leaders

I let each and every one of the leaders there know that they are all important and all valuable in their roles. I also mentioned that it is important to work together and to help each other out. There will be times where the challenges of the position and life will cause things to go sub-optimal. That doesn’t mean we need to let the person or the organization flounder. We all need to chip-in and help out. Just be careful to avoid stepping on other’s toes – make sure you respect when other people are working on a plan, and don’t overlay their good work.